Saturday, January 08, 2011

So the Tea Party has turned to murder, at last, to the very "second amendment remedies" Sharron Angle advocated earlier. An Arizona Congresswoman was gunned down at a grocery store I used to shop at when I lived there. A federal judge was killed in the attack; she may live. Her husband, it turns out, is an astronaut.

The goal of this attack is to try to literally make Democratic politicians afraid for their lives so they won't take certain courageous votes. That's political terrorism pure and simple. I don't suppose the GOP will let us punish it in the manner they claim is 100% OK by the US Constitution and that they have written into law: by locking the perpetrator up indefinitely overseas, by torturing him for months at a stretch, all as part of an endless "war on terror," then using the laws barring material aid to terrorists to shut down all the tea party cells and Fox News.

The almost unbelievable part of this is that it is a tempest in a teapot. Americans by and large want solutions to the problem of unaffordable health insurance and aren't horrified by the prospect of buying health insurance, something that 80% already voluntarily purchase. Yet this is the cause celebre of these right wing lunatics.

7 comments:

LTG, you forgot rounding up anyone who had sufficient contact with the suspect to justify giving them the third degree too.

This isn't the only incident of political violence directed against either the government or Democrats in the last year or so.

I'm sure we will hear a parade of the same people who said things like "don't retreat, reload" about how this has nothing to do with the violent subtexts to their political rhetoric and symbolism. But they will not change. They'll simply shrug and say "she had it coming."

Nobody from the Republican party or the Tea Party members advocates gunning down people with different views - we want to do this democratically, with our voices and our votes - its only the "crazy" people who resort to something like this. I understand your position of calling this "political terrorism" - but when its a single person committing the acts and not the policy of a major organization like Al Qaida, Panthers, NRA, etc - I don't really think you can call it terrorism - I think we all need to stick with calling it lunacy.

Many Republicans have decided it is cute to show up at rallies with guns, accuse their opponents of treason and being foreigners, communists, NAZIs etc. There are hundreds of pictures of people at these rallies with firearms and carrying posters talking about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants etc. So I think the rhetoric is pretty heated from that side of the political spectrum lately.

As for terrorism and its definition. We could go back and forth on this. But my view is that anyone who thinks murder is an appropriate form of political expression is crazy. I don't think either of us would say Tim McVeigh or Mohamed Atta were both insane. Therefore I think the mental state of the perpetrator is less relevant than other issues. So essentially your position seems to be that terrorism must be a conspiracy by two or more people to be terrorism. I disagree. I think a single person can commit terrorism. The crucial element from my perspective is motive. If the motive is political, it's terrorism.

If a political group likes to use the language of violence and then their opponents see an increase in threats of violence and actual attacks, then I'm inclined to say the starting point for analysis is that the rhetoric of the aforementioned political group has something to do with it.

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